George R. R. Martin Interview

I stumbled upon this recent interview with George R. R. Martin. He’s a pretty interesting guy and I didn’t realize he’d been so involved in television. Considering his Song of Ice and Fire series has been the single biggest influence on my novel I found his quote on what beginning writers should and shouldn’t do especially interesting:

GRRM: Do NOT do what they call“fan-fiction”. That’s not a very indicative term, I wrote fan-fiction, but I wrote ORIGINAL fan-fiction. I was a fan, and I wrote fiction, so it’s“fan-fiction”, but it was my own characters, it was my own universe from the beginning. I think it’s a very bad idea for a young writer to start writing in somebody else’s universe, whether it’s my universe or the Star Trek universe, or Robert Jordan’s universe, or Marion Zimmer-Bradley’s, it doesn’t matter. Create your own universe, create your own characters. That’s a HUGE part of what it takes to write, and if you borrow someone else’s universe as I see so many other people doing, you don’t learn the necessary skills to create your own. Sounds like I’m on the right track.